The Three Parts of a Business Development Process

“Building the Prototype of your business is a continuous process, a Business Development Process. It’s foundation is three distinct yet thoroughly integrated activities through which your business can pursue its natural evolution. They are Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration.”

Innovation

Gerber says you should innovate the way in which your business does business

“The Franchise Revolution has brought with it an application of Innovation that has been almost universally ignored by American business. By recognizing that it is not the commodity that demands Innovation but the process by which it is sold, the franchiser aims his innovative energies at the way in which his business does business.

To the franchiser, the entire process by which the business does business is a marketing tool, a mechanisms for finding and keeping customers.

Each and every component of the business system is a means through which the franchiser can differentiate his business from all other businesses in the mind of his consumer.”

Quantification

Gerber writes that you should quantify your innovation so you know the impact and where to spend your energy.

“But on its own, Innovation leads nowhere. To be at all effective, all Innovations need to be quantified. Without Quantification, how would you know whether the Innovation worked? By Quantification, I’m talking about the numbers related to the impact an Innovation makes.”

Orchestration

Create order, not more chaos, so you can focus your business on bigger and better things, than re-inventing the basics from scratch every time.

Gerber writes that you should integrate your most effective innovations into your processes and routines.

“Once you innovate a process and quantify its impact on your business, once you find something that works better than what preceded it, once you discovered how to increase the ‘yeses’ from your customers, your employees, your suppliers, and your lenders — at that point, it’s time to orchestrate the whole thing.

Orchestration is the elimination of discretion, or choice, at the operating level of your business.

Without Orchestration, nothing could be planned, and nothing anticipated — by you or your customer. If you’re doing everything differently each time you do it, if everyone in your company is doing it by their own discretion, their own choice, rather than creating order, you’re creating chaos.”

Key Take Aways

Here are my key take aways:

Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration are the keys to your business. Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration are the backbone of business development.

Innovate in how you do things. Innovate in how your business does business.

I have to admit, I really do like the distinctions and the precision that Gerber puts to the business development process.

What he’s really emphasizing is that your business is a living, breathing system with people and processes and that to survive, your business needs to continue to grow and learn through innovation.

But innovation doesn’t help if you don’t know the impact or if you don’t actually make it a part of your business.

Beautiful.

Reflecting back, I know that innovation was a key part of our patterns & practices team. We pushed innovation and changing the game. It wasn’t necessarily about innovating in the product, though we did that too.